“Please Touch the Art.”
While that’s the official name of the exhibition that opened on Saturday at the Charles H. Taylor Visual Arts Center in Hampton, it’s also an invitation to do what most museums and art centers forbid.
Visitors are encouraged to gently touch Sally Barker’s familiar works of art re-created as quilts. The North Carolina artist devised a unique color code that associates different fabrics with specific colors and textures, making the visual arts more accessible to the blind.
Red, for example, is linked with satin. Yellow goes with flannel, blue with wool, orange with taffeta and purple with linen. The darkest shades are backed with cardboard, the medium shades with foam and the lightest with soft quilt batting. She named it the Barker code for her husband, Larry.
Sally Barker is in the early stages of dementia and no longer gives interviews, but her son Bart Barker is eager to share his mother’s thoughts on her artwork. He lives close to his parents, who reside in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
“My mother developed the color wheel through trial and error as far as what color goes with what fabric,” he said. “The first one was obvious. Red and satin had to go together. But I remember her bringing all of the colors to a family reunion and passing them around like a giant focus group.”
Visually impaired patrons can experience some of the world’s most famous paintings using the Barker code. Each quilt includes a Braille “B” to distinguish whether it is right side up.
Twenty of Barker’s quilts are on display, including representations of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “The Red Poppy,” Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.”
“You don’t have to go to Paris to see the 'Mona Lisa.’ You can come to Hampton and feel it!” said Diana Blanchard Gross, manager of the visual arts center.
Barker quilted small versions of a few popular children’s characters that are also on view, including Clifford the Big Red Dog, Barney the dinosaur and Winnie the Pooh.
Barker sewed all her life, usually mending her sons' clothes. But she wasn't a quiltmaker. When a deaf friend mentioned attending a concert, Barker wanted to hear more. Her friend mentioned holding a blown-up balloon to her ear to feel the vibration at the concert, which gave her a sense of the music.
A few months later, walking through an art museum inspired Barker to find a way for the blind to appreciate perspective, color and composition of famous works that are often conversation starters. Retiring in 2000 as the vice president of the trust department of a bank, Barker had time to dedicate to a novel idea.
Using the color wheel, she began quilting during the evenings; Pablo Picasso’s “Woman Sitting Near a Window” was her first completed work.
Barker started by tracing a poster of the artist’s print. From that, she drew patterns on freezer paper, a laborious exercise of precise cutting and later assembling, like a puzzle. Her sewing space had bins of various hues of the primary colors, and she matched the colors to the patterns by hand sewing everything onto a quilt.
Reproducing “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” a Japanese woodblock print, was among the most challenging because of its intricate detail.
“It took her almost two years to finish,” Bart Barker said.
To avoid copyright infringement, Sally Barker made it clear that she wasn’t looking to represent each of the works as the art itself. She refers to them as homages. That piqued the interest of museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, which displayed Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” in its Touch Gallery and will eventually house nearly all of her work.
Barker became involved with the National Federation of the Blind and attended its convention. She introduced her art in multiple schools for the blind throughout North Carolina and New England and has spoken at conferences abroad about her process.
Barker doesn’t sew anymore – her eyes are affected by macular degeneration. Her son is proud that she has left behind a legacy for others to enjoy.
“They are usually really touched by these pieces,” Bart Barker said. “They’re getting a sense of the art. When their sighted friends talk about that art, they now have an idea. And they’ve been really appreciative of that.”
“Please Touch the Art” is on view through Aug. 23.
